Books are being digitized and released in digital format, making these books more accessible to Internet users. The focus of this digitization typically has been toward enabling online searching and viewing of the digitized books. A digital version of a book may originate from an original application format file that the publisher used to create the hardcopy printing of the book. Alternatively, a digital version of a book may be created by digitally scanning the printed book.
Support for printing high quality versions of such a digital version of a book generally has been a lower priority activity. Several issues may be seen as causing the support for printing such high quality versions to be a lower priority activity. Some of these issues include, for example, copyright issues, the higher cost of printing a digital version of a book, the complexity of a print-ready digital document, the lack of products that are focused on printing a single copy of a digital version of a book, the limitations of low cost finishing devices, etc. For these and other reasons, printing a single copy of a digital version of a book often has been seen as being unattractive and infeasible.
Traditionally, books have been printed on offset presses and have been assembled with specialized finishing equipment. To make the printing financially feasible, the number of copies to be printed has needed to be no less than ten thousand copies. In the traditional book manufacturing process, the printing and binding processes have been manually selected to accommodate the attributes of the book, such as the thickness of the book, the number of pages, the hardness of the cover of the book, the number of colors in the book, etc. The publisher and/or the author of the book typically have dictated the printing and binding processes.
With the advent of low-cost digital printing and finishing systems, the feasibility of profitably printing low volumes of books has increased. However, in order to provide the required automation and materials for low-cost book printing, these types of systems have suffered from constraints in many areas. Some of these constraints hamper the use of these systems in operating a successful book printing business. One typical constraint found in these types of systems is the limitation on the number of pages that can be bound into a single book. A binding device typically has a specified maximum allowable spine thickness of books that the device can bind. The spine thickness of a book may depend on the weight of the paper on which the book is printed. As a result, the maximum number of pages that a binding device can bind may vary based on the weight of the paper on which the book is printed. Additionally, a binding device may have other capacity attributes, such as a maximum number of sheets that the binding device can handle, for example. A binding device also may have other limits, such as the width of the binding tape (for tape binders), the length of the staple (for stapling binders), the maximum length of the stitch (for stitching binders), etc.
Under the traditional book printing process, books are specifically designed to have a specific thickness, binding type, and page count. The printing and finishing processes are selected based on these criteria.
However, digital versions of books typically are not designed to take into account any specific finishing device. As a result, digital versions of books, when printed, sometimes exceed the limitations (e.g., maximum spine thickness) of finishing devices (e.g., binding devices). Because of the limitations of finishing devices, digital versions of books are often not printed out and bound into a volume. Instead, digital versions are often kept only in digital form.